The present invention relates to an apparatus for innoxious disposal of medical wastes, and more particularly relates to improvement in innoxious disposal, i.e. disposal after making the waste harmless to the environment, of medical wastes such as syringe tubes, serum bottles, laboratory dishes and transfusion tubes mainly made of thermoplastic resins.
In general, for innoxious disposal of medical wastes, heat melting processes and crush sterilization processes have conventionally been employed.
The heat melting processes are further classified into two systems. In the first system, medical wastes are thrown into a heating bath arranged within an apparatus and are cooled into a solidified block after heat melting . In the second system, the solidified block is crushed into pieces. When disposed in block form, sharp articles such as syringe needles contained in the medical wastes tend to project from the block, which endanger subsequent handing of the block. In addition, plastic resins in the medical wastes maintain in bulky states during heat melting, thereby making handling difficult during the operation. When crushed, sharp articles such as syringe needles tend to remain in the crushed pieces without destruction, which again endangers subsequent handling of the pieces.
In the crush sterilization processes, medical wastes are first crushed in a crusher and next immersed into a sterilizer bath or subjected sterilizing spray in order to kill or paralyze pathogenic germs contained in the medical wastes. For reliable sterilization of residues in, for example, a syringe needle, complete mixing or replacement of the residue with a sterilizer is required. This is , however, very difficult in practice due to the small syringe needle spaces. In addition, these processes are also inevitably accompanied by the problem of residual sharp articles such as syringe needles.